The 1% Club host Jim Jefferies is difficult to pigeon hole - and that’s just the way he likes it

Love him, hate him — chances are, if you’ve heard of Australian comedian Jim Jefferies, you’ve got an opinion.

He might have crossed your path recently as host of Seven’s popular game show The 1% Club — on that show, he’s warm, irreverent, funny-as-heck, and your nan’s probably a fan.

Beloved shiny-floor show host? Tick.

Maybe you’ve happened upon him via social media. Snippets of his acerbic stand-up sets annihilating the US right’s gun control arguments do the rounds with alarming regularity (you can blame America’s less-than-stellar track record with mass shootings for that one).

Hero of the left? Also tick.

He’s hosted his own late-night talk show, starred in a sitcom he also wrote and directed, has four Netflix specials, and still regularly tours the world selling out his stand-up shows. Uber-popular funnyman? Tick.

But, just as likely, Jefferies’ name has entered your consciousness for entirely the wrong reasons.

You might have read a scathing review of one of his shows or been outraged by his Netflix special Freedumb. You might have taken a deep-dive into his back catalogue via YouTube and discovered material that, well, pushes (some would say past) the boundaries of good taste.

In 2017, The Hollywood Reporter branded him “a great stand-up” displaying an “almost belligerent common sense”; two years later, The Guardian called him a “filthy comic” whose show mixed “a sex-and-excrement” with “tedious misogyny”.

Polarising? Go right ahead and tick that box, too.

So just who is the real Jim Jefferies? And how is he able to exist simultaneously as beloved family-man game show host and out-there no-effs-to-give stand-up star?

This is a fine line to tread — between fans who like his no-holds-barred jokes and detractors who think he’s just plain offensive — and he’s been tiptoeing successfully along it for quite some time now. Hell, he’s walked it all the way from Perth to the most prestigious comedy stages in the world.

How?

It’s a good question. And one that appears to confound even Jefferies himself.

“I never had my eyes on America. I never saw that as the end goal,” he tells STM over the phone from his home in LA, which he shares with wife Tasie Lawrence, their two year-old son and Jefferies’ 11-year-old son from a previous relationship.

We’re reminiscing on his long journey from Wednesday night comedy gigs at The Brass Monkey, to now, and it’s at this point in our chat that we’re talking about his years working in the UK.

He left for England in 2001, a year after leaving WAAPA (Jefferies began studying musical theatre before swapping to opera, of all things, until throat nodules put paid to his singing career).

He’d been doing gigs at open-mic nights around Perth and was determined to try his hand. He flew out of the country just one day after September 11, a date seared into his memory.

“I really had no plan — I just knew I wanted to be a full time comedian,” Jefferies says.

“I figured if I worked as a full-time comedian, they’d let me keep my three-month visa going the whole time.

“Because that’s all I had, this three-month working visa — and I ended up staying there for 10 years.”

That’s 10 years of working the comedy clubs, night after night after night — many would have packed it in.

But not Jefferies — he kept on gigging, hoping that someone would eventually take notice.

“I always remember thinking that if I got sick and couldn’t do stand up — if I had no gigs in the diary, they would send me home, so I had to perpetually keep doing stand-up to stay in the country,” he says.

“I figured if I didn’t do it, I was going to be sent back like it was 1788!”

It wasn’t until 2007 that Jefferies got his big break — and it came in the most unexpected of ways.

He achieved international attention that year after he was attacked on stage while performing at the Manchester Comedy Festival, by a punter who apparently took exception to a joke. It was filmed on an in-house camera and became one of the early “viral” videos, introducing Jefferies to a new, global audience; he also later included the footage in his shows.

America came knocking, and in 2009, HBO released his first special, I Swear to God, kickstarting the next chapter.

“When I went over to America, they gave me a green card (visa) straight away, and I remember thinking, ‘I guess I’ll stay here then. They seem to want me’,” he says.

In 2014, he filmed a Netflix special in which he eviscerated US gun control laws — it went viral and his fame skyrocketed. It saw him enter an orbit that saw him befriend Brad Pitt, who agreed to appear on his late-night show as an off-kilter weatherman, and book a gig from Mariah Carey for her then-beau James Packer’s party, with Eddie Murphy, Al Pacino and Warren Beatty in the crowd (it was “terrible” he said later, but gave him boundless new material).

By this stage he’d been away from Australia for a decade, but audiences overseas, particularly the US, were connecting with his out there, ocker sense of humour.

There has been nary a touchy topic he won’t make fun of and he’s previously said his rule of thumb is that the more sensitive the subject matter, the funnier the joke has to be.

But however incorrigible he might seem, Jefferies is not completely impervious to criticism.

“I do get a little p..... off when I hear people saying that I go for cheap laughs,” he told The West Australian in 2015 ahead of three sell-out shows at Crown Theatre, “because I tell you what, there’s nothing cheap about a laugh where people start writing articles about what an animal you are.”

Jefferies has always been much better known in the UK and US than in his native country, and bases himself largely in America.

“It was never a matter of not wanting to live in Australia,” he says of his decision to keep living abroad.

“It’s just that in my opinion, the Australian comedy circuit, at that time, wasn’t big enough to make a good living.

“I honestly believed that the style of actor that I was, I would never be on TV, so what was the point?

“Now look at me — I’m a family entertainer!”

A family entertainer right there on prime-time television, with all the bells and whistles that accompany that.

But it’s not his first time on the small screen.

After relocating Stateside, Jefferies scored an HBO comedy series, Legit, which ran for two seasons from 2013. Later, he got a hallowed late-night slot for The Jim Jefferies Show, which aired from 2017-2019.

Fast forward to now, and the second series of The 1% Club, which last year was Australia’s number one entertainment show, is about to hit screens, with a third going into production in July.

His stint on the family-friendly entertainment show is positively wholesome — and feels slightly at-odds with the work he’s done up to now. But he’s clearly enjoying it.

“I actually love my time coming to Australia and hosting game shows,” he insists.

“We shoot for two weeks, and we do basically an episode a day, and then we do a couple of days of two episodes.

“The whole thing takes two weeks for 10 episodes, but for me personally, if we could get the green light, I would bash out 20 of them.”

For Jefferies, his work here is about as close to a nine-to-five as he’s ever likely to get, and he loves it.

“It’s like I have a regular job, where I go to work and I come back and I go to dinner with friends at night,” he says.

So would he ever consider relocating back here and doing more TV?

“I am an American citizen, I consider myself to be an Australian-American, but I still have my passport, and I still call Australia home,” he explains.

“I would love to move back to Australia, but I think it might be when I’m in retirement, or when I’m older.

“It’s very hard — I have two children to two different women (Jeffries’ eldest son is from his first marriage, to actress Kate Luyben), so I can’t take both kids back to Australia.

“So, really, I am not going anywhere until my boys are off in college and ready to go.”

But once they’re sorted — well, that’s another thing entirely.

“I think about moving to Perth a lot — I am a big fan of Perth. I think it’s wonderful,” he says.

“If I move back to Australia, that’s where I will be going.

“I’d like to live in Cottesloe, or Scarborough or something like that. Yes, I would be very happy living in Perth.”

Jefferies says he has fond memories of his time here in the late-1990s.

“I studied musical theatre for a year, and then I changed courses and went and studied opera, because my singing and my acting classes were going alright, but my dancing left a lot to be desired,” he laughs.

So can he still belt out a bit of opera?

“No, I can’t sing anymore,” he laughs. “People always want you to sing, and I can’t! It’s been a long time, and I haven’t really done that since I was 19 years old.

“It’s just a muscle I haven’t flexed in a long time.”

But his stand-up muscle? That’s one he continues to work out on a regular basis.

Today, once he finishes this chat, he’ll head to a comedy club in LA to test out new material ahead of his up-coming Aussie tour, which will kick off in July after filming finishes for The 1% Club.

This interview is giving him a moment to reflect on just how far he’s come.

“I tell you what, Perth was a good place to start comedy,” he says.

“There weren’t many venues, but there also weren’t many comics, so it was good if you could get a bit of work — you didn’t have to fight against all the people in Sydney or Melbourne.

“Back then, it was a small community of people, and for me it was so much more exciting than going to university and learning how to act and sing and dance.”

That WAAPA course never stood a chance, then?

“What I will give WAAPA though, is that it did help me hit the ground running,” Jefferies says.

“I didn’t have to worry about stage fright and all that type of stuff, because I had already done so much work at university. And there were some teachers there that were bloody hard teachers, and bloody hard people. They were more scary than any stand-up audience.”

And when you’re bombing on stage in Perth, at least you’re not bombing in front of an audience of hundreds.

“True,” he admits.

“I am popping into improv tonight — it’s Tuesday night, so it will be sold out at The Comedy Store (a famous comedy venue in Los Angeles). And last night, there were 400 people there on a Monday night.

“But you know what? Those Brass Monkey gigs were the most important gigs of my career.

“They were the ones that were either going to be a moment where I quit, or I kept going.”

Keep going he did — and now here we are.

“If those gigs didn’t go well, there’s a good chance I wouldn’t be where I am now,” Jefferies admits.

“So, you know, those were really important — they were arguably more important than selling out the Rod Laver Arena.

“There would be no Rod Laver Arena without The Brass Monkey.”

The 1% Club returns Wednesday February 21 at 7.30 on Channel 7 and 7plus.